Author: Jonathan Day

I am a writer and consultant. My church home is the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception (Farm Street Church) in central London, where I serve at the altar and help with adult education at the Mount Street Jesuit Centre. I recently became the chair of Council at Newman University, a small Catholic university in Birmingham. I write here in a purely personal capacity.

A scholar in liturgy who is also a professor of renaissance English and a convert from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy says that use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer material by English-speaking Antiochian Orthodox communities is harmful in many ways — in essence, it imports heresy into the liturgy. Much of his critique is relevant to the Ordinariate use of Prayer Book language and texts.

Now that the new English translation of the Roman Missal is in place, five newly translated liturgical texts are moving through the process of revision and approval: Confirmation, Marriage, Dedication of a Church and an Altar, Exorcism; and a supplement to the Liturgy of the Hours.

A report from the Sacra Liturgia conference suggests that we are entering an age of liturgical pluralism and peace, and that traditionalism has been transformed. What would transformed traditionalism look like?